THEM AS CAN, DOES

 

 

So you had an idea for a science fiction story.

So after considerable effort you got it down on paper.

So you mailed it to John W. Campbell and sat back to await the cheque, and no cheque came—just the MS, with a note on the rejection slip informing you of the existence of International Reply Coupons and intimating that if you want the next story returned you’d better enclose some.

So you chewed off an eighth of an inch of fingernail and sent it (the MS, not the piece of nail) to Michael Moorcock, and it came home again, and you sent it in desperation to a fanzine and it came back from there, too.

 

Well, without actually seeing the story you wrote (which, believe me, is typical of hundreds such), I can put my finger on precise reasons. But I’m going to try and indicate some general faults, and leave it to you to figure out the particular applications in your case.

I collected my first rejection slip when I was about 13. I still get them more frequently than I’d like (which is never at all). Somewhere between the two poles of invariable rejection and hundred per cent sales lies a point at which you learn to do some editing of your own work—including, if need be, your own rejections—and once that turnover is reached, you stand a damned good chance of selling.

Here’s a set of rather inaccurate signposts which may guide you towards a first sale, or more sales, or something.

 

First: some elementary things not to do, which I’d cheerfully leave out if it weren’t for the fact that people do them. (Ask any editor.)

Don’t submit an MS handwritten on old blotting paper. Mark Twain sabotaged handwritten MSS a long time ago; he was the first writer, as far as I know, to submit a story typed double-spaced on one side of plain white paper, and this is nowadays the irreducible minimum. You want the editor to pay attention to you. Make his job easier by supplying a legible script with the fewest hand-corrections you can manage, and the chances of his actually reading it go up from near-zero to pretty damned good.

Further: don’t display your ignorance of the field. From my own experience here’s a splendid example of how to ensure that a story gets bounced. When I was about fourteen or fifteen, having read van Vogt’s Centaurus II, it occurred to me that one of these multigeneration interstellar arks was liable to be overtaken on the way by superior vessels, and the unfortunate crew would reach their goal to discover it was already a human colony.

A great idea. And the story kept bouncing … and bouncing … because the plot had also occurred to (guess who?) van Vogt. I hadn’t read his version, but any editor trying to keep abreast of the field was bound to assume I had.

This is not to say (a) that no one should attempt to write sf unless he’s been reading it since amazing stories Vol. I No. 1, nor (b) that every single idea has to be immaculately original. Most of my own plots are second-stage derivatives of other people’s suggestions.

What I am driving at is that you must know and be prepared to be judged by the highwater marks of previously published material. If you want to write a story about (to revert to a theme already instanced) a long-voyage ship with a multi-generation crew, you must have some acquaintance with Bob Heinlein’s Universe. If you want to write about robots, you must be prepared to find that Asimov got there first. If you want to write about a future dominated by overblown business corporations, you must be aware that Pohl and Kornbluth staked out a huge claim in the same area, and so on.

 

Let’s assume, therefore, that you have a reasonable knowledge of the field, and you still think you’ve hit on a new twist of your theme, whether or not it’s been used by someone else. (The first story I ever sold to astounding stemmed from a single sentence in Cliff Simak’s Time Quarry; much of the material in Telepathist derived from the key element of Peter Phillips’s Dreams are Sacred. I mention this to emphasise that figuring out a new twist is a perfectly adequate basis for actually writing a story.)

Now take stock of the plot you’re considering. Begin asking yourself what shape it is. In other words: is it a capsule event, taking place in one, or at most a few, locations over a comparatively limited span of time? (This is a tricky question to settle in sf, because a story may last one day, narrational time, and one end might be in the Triassic and the other in the 25th Century … but never mind; the principle holds because it’s a rule applicable to fiction generally, not to sf alone.)

In this case, you have a short story plot. You do not attempt to depict the rise and fall of whole civilisations, or describe a galactic empire in detail. You work out your background on scrap paper, choose some really important elements and slot them into the story unobtrusively, and beyond that forget it—except to ensure that your characters are behaving consistently with the setting you’ve given them.

Or, considering the other end of the scale: have you settled on an idea which must be acted out by more than one leading character, each involved in events which surround the main thread of the action and affect it by affecting the people who carry this action forward?

Then you’re plotting a novelette or a novel, and you’re going to have to spend a great deal more time thinking before you start writing.

This is a distinction which gets very blurred in contemporary fiction, but basically sf is structured in the old pulp tradition and hence refers to an old-fashioned narrative technique (a curious and rather saddening reflection on our “literature of the future”). So for the first few attempts at any rate stick by that rough guide, and take it as dogma that a short story should consist in a single event or a tightly connected series of events, the action being carried by as few named characters as possible, with about two or three of them being depicted in fairly substantial detail to engage the reader’s attention.

I stress this because a major attraction of sf is its sense of impersonal forces at work, the gigantic panoramic screen it can encompass—given adequate space to work in. But lets face it: neither you nor I should tackle an Olaf Stapledon-sized canvas … and for that reason you must fight shy of trying to cram the rise and fall of empires into three thousand words.

By this stage you should have mapped out in your mind the entire course your story will take, buttressing your memory with some notes—as it might be: “Open with sighting of inexplicable object adrift in ocean (establish protagonist as man who spots it first for economy’s sake); why is ship there, who is protagonist, weather good or bad? Cut to occupant (?) of object as ship turns to pick it up. Hold back full description of object’s nature to halfway point of story. Argument among crew develops as they inspect and try to open it. Three/four strange facts worry them. Payoff and explanations to end with; plant clues in middle of story to shorten ending and avoid anticlimax.”

I did that off the top of my head. I don’t know what the object was or who/what was in it. But I can think of lots of possibilities: maybe the ship is the Golden Hind and the object is a Martian saucer, or maybe the crew are illiterate Polynesian fishermen and the object is a re-entry vehicle in which the astronaut is slowly suffocating. I don’t care. I’m only trying to illustrate one good rhythm for the story to follow: a hook right at the beginning, a mystery halfway through, a strong payoff as close to the last paragraph as the story structure permits, and an argument among the crew as a means of sustaining the reader’s interest meanwhile.

This leads me to the burning question of “characterisation.” Doubtless you have read many reviews of sf books you thought were pretty damned good, where the critic declared the story was weakened by poor characterisation; very possibly you said to yourself, “What the hell does he mean by that?”

Let’s clear up one too-facile preconception before we go any further. Characterisation does not simply mean creating “characters”—oddballs, eccentrics, way-out types—although there is no reason why it shouldn’t embrace that. Jubal Harshaw, in Stranger in a Strange Land, counts as both kinds of character, and I think if you check up you’ll see what I’m implying. (But Heinlein tends to rely too much on the creation of grand eccentrics; when he’s tackling a plot that doesn’t provide opportunities for such people, the weaknesses of his method begin to show.)

It also does not mean building up a larger-than-life individual at the expense of the action. Nor does it mean introducing someone with a line of light banter and a stiff upper lip. For an object lesson in how to go disastrously wrong, inspect a story called Expedition Mercy, by J. A. Winter, M.D., in Great Science Fiction about Doctors. Here, the crew of a starship en route to a planet known to be hostile in some incredibly subtle fashion spend most of their time grinning at and ribbing each other like self-conscious schoolboys. Ask yourself if you’d expect adults to behave in the way Winter describes. A plot like his calls for a sense of impending doom; any laughter heard aboard that ship would be tinged with hysteria.

What characterisation does mean is showing off your actors in a light that (a) engages the reader’s interest and (b) suggests that their reactions conform to a credible human pattern. Are the people stranded lightyears from home? They’ll be scared, then; they’ll be insecure. How does insecurity manifest itself? Argument and backbiting, trying to blame each other for the mess they’re in. Factions will form, often for irrational reasons—if the group is mixed, a man may side with a pretty girl because he hopes to seduce her, not because he thinks she’s talking sense. And so on.

Similarly: life is complicated and likely to go on being so. People display weakness, catch cold, grow bored, eat and drink, worry over trivialities, and cherish secret ambitions. The difference between a well-rounded fictional character and a cardboard puppet is essentially this: that the author has become personally acquainted with the former and chosen from his pseudo-human image a set of traits which outline him sharply in the reader’s mind.

Word of warning: don’t bog your action down in such personal traits, because it’s as dangerous as laying on the background too thickly. A good writer will combine the two processes into one. He’ll use the important details of the background to display the character. Example: take a world where automation has reduced the chance of getting a job, and a protagonist who hates being a pensioner on society’s National Assistance roster. Don’t start by saying “X was miserable because since the twentieth century the world had …” Have him—say—lose his temper with a girl he wants to marry, and drive her away in a helpless fit of railing against the situation he finds himself in. See?

 

Dialogue is immensely important, and the commonest reason why beginning writers’ sf stories are unreadable is lack of it. This lack of it, in turn, is ascribable to insufficient work on the characters. Puppets don’t talk to each other, but it’s almost impossible to stop real people doing so.

Where possible, use dialogue to get across background information essential to the plot. Don’t lean over backwards, of course; don’t have long lectures in quotation marks of which the substance is presumably already known to the listener. In fact, don’t have long lectures anyhow. Break the key elements down into assimilable units and feed some of them in as dialogue, some as straight information and some as subjective reaction inside the leading character’s mind. Like this. (Now let’s see if I can actually do it!)

Yes, here’s something. You’re writing about a breakdown in a giant computer on which depends the survival of the human colonists on Mudball. You tackle it this way:

 

The instant Joe Bloggs entered the low-ceilinged computer hall, he felt a sense of doom. The inspection panels of the main output bank were open, and five people were peering into the works. That much he’d expected, even though the vidphone call which had brought him from his quarters hadn’t mentioned accident or breakdown.

But one of those people was the Planetary President himself.

The general alarm hadn’t sounded, that was for sure. What sort of disaster rated the personal attention of the President, yet had to be kept secret for fear of panic?

As Joe approached, Mac Hooligan, computer chief of the colony, broke off what he was saying and strode to greet him.

“Joe, thank goodness you’re here! CADILAC has gone crazy, and all we can get out of it is the poems of Edward Lear!”

“Have you checked the input landlines?” Joe demanded. “There was a report of metal-eaters migrating in this direction, and if they got at the cables—”

“Do you think we’re fools?” blazed Sandra Pigswill, Mac’s deputy. Joe guessed that she would have resisted the idea of calling on him for help until every other possibility was exhausted. She resented any interference by outsiders; her whole life was dedicated to the independence of Mudball.

“The fault’s definitely in this building,” Mac confirmed hastily, afraid of a time-wasting argument. Joe’s heart sank. He knew Mac too well to question the assertion.

“But—but the meteorological section warned us this morning that we could expect the stormy season to break ahead of schedule!”

No one bothered to answer.

And why should they? Joe asked himself as he stared sickly at CADILAC. There can’t be anyone on Mudball barring babes in arms who doesn’t know what it would mean to face those gales without computers!

 

That reads a bit like one of the “model passages” put out by the schools of authorship, I’m afraid, but I’ve fudged it up purely to emphasise that you don’t begin this kind of story by saying: “After the third world war Earth was pacified and in 2167 Sebastian Quodge invented a star-drive and thousands of people were lost in the early emigrations but some planets were colonised after a terrible struggle and everybody was given free algae-bread and became atheists and only computers could deal with such dangerous alien animals as the energy-beasts of Arcturus and one day on Mudball the eleventh planet of Algol a guy called Joe Bloggs who hadn’t been there long and only emigrated because his girl threw him over back in Des Moines …”

If the loss of the early starships matters to your plot, introduce someone who was saved from a wreck and suffers nightmares about his experience; if free algae-bread is important, have someone grouse about it at mealtime—and so on.

In other words: integrate what the reader has to know into what the people in the story are concerned about.

 

One final word. Writing, like a good many other human activities including cookery and sex, contain incommunicable elements which you can only learn by doing it. It’s one, however, where it’s readily feasible to learn by other people’s mistakes. (Cheaper and quicker than making your own!)

By this, I mean that what appears on the printed page for you to read is susceptible of being analysed and argued about. Try this illuminating exercise. Take a fresh look at a story you didn’t like, but someone else presumably did: a reputable anthologist like Judith Merril, or the editor of a leading magazine. Ask yourself whether (a) you simply didn’t see the point the author was driving at, or (b) you honestly could have improved on the way it was handled, by making the plot clearer, or more logical, or on a technical level by applying one of the general principles indicated above and redistributing the proportion of dialogue to background information, or in some other definable way.

If the answer is (a), you may either have picked a story which essentially didn’t say very much, or you may have hit on one which really is a tour de force. In new worlds 152 James Colvin made what seems to me a patronising comment on Blish’s Common Time. I think that’s one of the most, tremendous sf stories ever printed; I’ve read it half a dozen times and each time I’ve found another level in it. Save the analysis of a technique like that for much, much later—the chances are that it’s so individual you can’t profit by its example.

But if the answer is (b), you’re on the way to acquiring an insight into how a story is put together, and the only thing left for you to do is demonstrate that the lesson has sunk in.

 

From New Worlds, January 1966; copyright © by John Brunner, 1965.

 

“Faithless Jack the Spaceman”

 

1 Sing I for an interstellar ship, be it rusty-red as Mars,

A cyborg crew and computers too to carry me to the stars!

To carry me to the stars, me boys, like my true love

/before—

He went on a trip in an overdrive ship and ne’er was heard

/of more!

Damn the cosmic rays! I’ll brave the solar blaze!

The risks of space I’ll boldly face, the hyperspatial maze!

I’ll find my own true love among the stars above—

Let the countdown start or I’ll break my heart and I don’t

/care what I pays!

2 Sing I for an ultra-radio that can bring me news of Jack—

A whisper’ll do, just a word or two to say he’s coming

/back!

Or has he perhaps been killed, me boys, on a strange

/planet’s shore?

Are his bones left to bleach on an alien beach or in some

/monster’s maw?

Damn the meteorites! I’m steeled for horrid sights!

Though spatial warps may hide his corpse I’ll give it

/funeral rites!

I’ll find my own true love among the stars above

And the beast I’ll split open bit by bit to bring my Jack

/to light!

3 Or is his a fouler fate than that, and upon Arcturus Two

Is he betrayed by an alien maid with skin of a lustrous

/blue,

With hair of a purple hue, me boys, in a stellar paradise?

I’ll race into space and I’ll spit in her face and I’ll

/claw out all her eyes!

Damn that alien she, whoever she may be!

Though girls with fur he may prefer to Earthly girls like

/me,

I'll find my own true love among the stars above And he knows quite well that I’ll give him hell for his

/inconstancy!

Air traditional, “Ten Thousand Miles Away”; words: John Brunner.

All rights reserved by Brunner Fact & Fiction Ltd.